This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Wolberton and me, David Edmunds.

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The French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir thought a lot about authenticity. But what

did she mean for an act to be authentic? What does it mean to choose authentically?

These are questions that the philosopher SkyCleari has chosen freely and authentically to investigate.

SkyCleari, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you Nigel, thanks for having me.

The topic we're going to focus on today is authenticity. I wonder if you could just begin

by saying what you mean by authenticity? Yeah, I see authenticity as a person creating

an authentic life and I'm coming at it from Simone de Beauvoir's perspective and she

defines it as the process of creating your essence. Okay, so essence in common parlance

means the thing at the very heart of something. Is that what you mean by essence?

I do, but I mean something slightly different from an existential perspective. Existence

precedes essence, meaning that we exist first, we're thrown into the world, there are

facts of our lives that we can't change. And it's not that there's an essence inside

of us, rather essence is something that we create. And so authenticity is a process of

figuring out how to create that essence, how we can transcend the facts of our lives,

how we can express our freedom and actively become who we choose to be.

So you choose what you are, even though you are thrown into existence, you just find

yourself existing, there's a sense in which everything after that is a self-creation.

Exactly. The existential philosophers acknowledge that we can't choose everything about our

lives and there are certain facts of our lives, what they call facticity. And authenticity

...